To enhance the ability for students to develop levels of excellence in academic writing and to contrast this with variable possibilities in the requirements of future professional writing in the fields of Management and Business.

This module will be useful for:

• Second and third year students who need to further develop writing ability as a result of writing development needs identified from year 1;
• Second year entry students on internationally agreed 2+2 programmes;
• Second and third year students who need to develop an awareness and appreciation of finer nuances of written communication in academic and professional life;
• Students who wish to pursue the development of writing with a view to career plans that may involve significant professional writing responsibilities;
• To provide pathways to writing at higher levels of critical and self reflexive complexity for those intending to pursue postgraduate studies.

In semester 1 the module covers aspects of planning, drafting, re-drafting, editing and submitting written academic work in essay and report format. It will compare and contrast these approaches to writing with approaches required in the workplace and in professional media. To facilitate this students will work with case studies in management and business to identify issues in structural and rhetorical descriptions of written communication and in particular how choices made by individual communicators impact on academic and professional audiences.

In semester 2 the module develops upon the themes of semester 1 to engage students with the development of an extended portfolio of work that builds on individual research and/or professional interests. This would be facilitated by formal proposal, individual written work, team-based comparison and contrast of themes, oral presentation and self-reflexive report on writing and communications development.

The content listed here is categorized into thematic areas and does not represent linear syllabus specification.

Semester 1

• What is academic and professional English? How is communication at this level shaped by academic and professional communities?
• Essay & report structures
• Identification of critical audience characteristics and how to write to an academic or professional brief
• Avoiding plagiarism and bad practice in academic contexts; use of citation, reference, bibliography and acknowledgement
• Identification of critical issues in using web-based research material and how to recognise academically and professionally structured text through professional approaches to writing for the web
• Language development as required by given student groups; e.g. functions of present and past tenses, active and passive voice, noun phrase sentence patterns and repetition of noun phrases.
• Revision and redrafting of writing for academic submission and professional publication

Semester 2

• Establishing style and voice in writing a research proposal
• Evaluating appropriate structures and methods for conducting small scale research
• Critical reflection on theoretical and practical issues in team work, cooperative learning and group dynamics
• Synthesising points of comparison and contrast, or parallel threads for developing critical review in cases of original theories and/or practices
• Aspects of oral communications
• Differences between speaking and writing for varying audiences
• Development of self reflexivity in report writing that can inform approaches to critical writing